The impact of HIV/AIDS on the world is difficult to overlook, perhaps more so
in the San Francisco bay area where the epidemic decimated the gay community in
the 80’s and 90’s. While not directly affected, I have supported AIDS-related
organizations and legislation in San Francisco and California at large ever
since I moved here over a decade ago. This year I will be trying something of
a slightly different color: AIDS/LifeCycle.
An event which brings thousands of cyclists, roadies, and supporters together
to ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles, raising millions of dollars in the
process. This year, rather than donating to friends’ fundraising activities,
I will be joining them!.

Within the last two years the air above Santa Rosa has become thick with ash,
acrid, and severely unhealthy. A year ago the immensely destructive Tubbs Fire
bore down on northern Santa Rosa obliterating thousands of homes. For days
afterwards the skies were filled with the smoke and ash from the epic
destruction.

Whenever possible, I typically send much of my traffic through the
Tor network, including traffic to some services
which I operate for myself, such as a secure shell server. When I am traveling
or otherwise not on my home network, I use one of Tor’s more fun features:
Onion Services (formerly
known as Hidden Services). Onion Services can be identified by the *.onion
top-level domain and allow the server’s location to be anonymous/concealed
just like the client.

One year ago today, I watched the Sonoma county fires pour over Shiloh ridge
towards the Fountaingrove neighborhood. I wrote about the experience, and
subsequent evacuation in “Watching fire
come down the mountain”.
The response across Sonoma county to the fires was as monumental as the fires
themselves, and for my part, I spent the next two weeks working with old and
new friends to build and support Sonoma Fire Info
to strive to get as much accurate information to our fellow residents as
possible.

Santa Rosa is a wonderful city located within Sonoma county, and I have been
encouraging just about anybody who will listen to come visit since I moved here
some years ago. Glossing over a bunch of details, one year ago today the fires
began, which tore into Santa Rosa. In reaction to that, a few of my friends and
I, along with a number of other hackers and volunteers created
Sonoma Fire Info. Some time after the fires were
contained, a few of us set out to create something in response to rebuild in a
different way, something would help invigorate the area we know and love, we
created Startup Sonoma County

A number of organizations I am part of use Google Apps for their Email,
Calendaring, Storage, etc, which means that I recently became one of the
millions of users who recently had too much load time, excessive white-space,
and awkwardly huge buttons foisted upon them by the new Gmail re-design.
On my 13” large screen, the new design leaves far too little space for email,
which seems like perhaps somebody missed the point.

For Jenkins, the plugin ecosystem is one of its key
advantages over other tools offering some similar functionality. That power and
flexibility does not come without its own set of problems for the project
itself. From an outsiders perspective, the challenges around dependency and
update management between Jenkins plugins is a substantial topic, worthy of at
least a couple of doctoral theses in computer science and sociology
respectively. For insiders within the Jenkins developer community, the
relations between plugins in the ecosystem makes a bizarre kind of sense. Like
the tax code, it’s something you figure out how to work within, but never dare
dig in too deeply, for fear of your head exploding. In this blog post, I’d like
to share my philosophy on how we, the Jenkins project, should think about
plugin dependencies and how that contrasts to the status quo.

It took me a little while to get comfortable with
TypeScript when used in conjunction with
Feathers. I have found the combination to be quite
useful for building small little web APIs and applications over the past couple
months, but starting from scratch has been a bit of a pain. Tweaking all the
configuration files, and getting all the right dependencies installed is not
somemthing I want to keep resident in my memory, so I have created this
feathers-typescript-starter
repository.

I have been using Feathers for a number of projects
lately, including the backend and client for Jenkins
Evergreen.
It is obvious from the design and structure of Feathers that a significant
amount of thought went into its development. Overall, I have been happy with
the experience implementing clean APIs, and have added Feathers as my default
toolchain for new web API and application development. Feathers has been great
for building JSON-based RESTful APIs, but I stumbled over some hurdles when
using it as a more traditional web application framework.

Almost every web framework I have used in the past five years shares the same
stupid flaw: mishandling of redundant slashes. Invariably this causes problems
when some script somewhere joins URL segments together with multiple slashes
in them, and ends up receiving a 404.